Along the Infinite Sea: Love, friendship and heartbreak, the perfect summer read - Beatriz Williams

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drawl, emphasis on the awful.

      “Oh, not at all. I’m happy I could help.”

      Pepper’s radar ears detect a note of wistfulness. She sinks on the bed, bracing her arms on either side of her heavy belly, and says, “Helped me? Kidnapped is more like it.”

      “Miss Pepper Schuyler,” Annabelle says, shaking her head, “why on this great good earth are you so suspicious? What have they done to you?”

      “A better question, Mrs. Annabelle Dommerich, is why you care.”

      An exasperated line appears between Annabelle’s eyebrows. She marches to the bed, drops down next to Pepper, and snatches her hand. Her hand! As if Annabelle is the mother bear and Pepper is Goldilocks or something. “Now, look here,” she actually says, just like a mother bear, “you are safe here, do you hear me? Nobody’s going to call you or make demands on you or—God knows, whatever it is you’re afraid of.”

      “I’m not afraid—”

      “You’re just going to sit here and grow your baby and think about what you want to do with yourself, is that clear? You’re going to relax, for God’s sake.”

      “Hide, you mean.”

      “Yes, hide. If that’s what you want to call it. There’s a doctor in town, if you need to keep up with any appointments. The housekeeper can drive you. You can telephone your parents and your sisters. You can telephone that horse’s ass who put you in this condition, and tell him he can go to the devil.”

      Pepper cracks out a whiplash of laughter. “Go to the devil! That’s a good one. I can just picture him, hanging up the phone and trotting off obediently into the fire and brimstone, just because Pepper Schuyler told him to. Do you have any idea who his friends are? Do you have any idea who owes him a favor or two?”

      “He’s no match for you. Trust me. You hold the cards, darling. You hold the ace. Don’t let those bastards convince you otherwise.”

      Pepper stares at the mama-bear hand covering her own. The nails are short and well trimmed, the skin smooth and ribbed gently with veins the color of the ocean. Annabelle doesn’t use lacquer.

      “You still haven’t answered my question,” Pepper says. “Why do you care?”

      Annabelle sighs and heads for the door. She pauses with her hand right there on the knob. Dramatic effect. Who knew she had it in her?

      “All right, Pepper. Why do I care? I care because I stood in your shoes twenty-nine years ago, and God knows I could have used a little decent advice. Someone to keep me from making so many goddamned mistakes.”

       ANNABELLE

       Antibes • 1935

      1.

      A week passed. Charles had left with his friends before I returned; I was now wise enough to suspect why. Herr von Kleist packed up his few trunks and roared away in his beautiful Mercedes Roadster later that afternoon. My father—as always—rose late, retired late, and reserved nearly all of his time for his remaining guests. I had little to do except wander the garden and the beaches, to practice my cello for hours, to walk sometimes into the village, to examine the contents of my memory for signposts to my future.

      On the seventh day of my isolation, I woke up under the settled conviction that I would move to Paris, to Montparnasse, and teach the cello while I found a master under whom to study. It seemed a natural place for me. I was both French and American, and I had read about how the streets and cafés around the boulevard du Montparnasse rattled with Americans seeking art and life and meaning and cheap accommodation. If a certain handsome young German Jew were then to turn up on my stoop one day, perhaps requiring immediate medical assistance, why, I would take him in with cheerful surprise. I would find a way to weave him into the hectic fabric of my happiness.

      I was not going to wait any longer for my life to start. I was going to start my life on my own.

      I repeated this to myself—a very nice tidy maxim, suitable for cross-stitch into a tapestry, a decorative pillow perhaps—as I walked down the stairs on my way to the breakfast room, where I expected the usual hours of peace until the rest of the household woke up. Instead, it was chaos. The hall was full of expensive leather trunks and portmanteaus, the rugs were being rolled up, the servants were running about as if an army were on the march. In the middle of it all stood my father, dressed immaculately in a pale linen suit, speaking on the telephone in rapid French, the cord wound around him and stretched to its limit.

      “Papa?” I said. “What’s going on?”

      He held up one finger, said a few more urgent words, and set the receiver in its cradle with an exhausted sigh. He closed his eyes, collecting his thoughts, and then stepped to the hall table and set down the telephone. “Mignonne,” he said in French, opening his arms, “it is eight o’clock already. You are not ready?”

      I took his hands and kissed his cheeks. He smelled of oranges, the particular scent of his shaving soap, which he purchased exclusively from a tiny apothecary in the Troisième, on the rue Charles-François-Dupuis. “Ready for what, Papa?”

      “You did not see my message last night?” His eyes were heavy and bruised.

      “What message? Papa, what’s wrong?”

      “I slipped it under your door. Perhaps you were already asleep.” He released my hands and pulled out a cigarette case from his jacket pocket. His fingers fumbled with the clasp. “It is a bit of a change of plans. We are leaving this morning, returning to Paris.”

      “But we were to stay another week!”

      “I’m afraid there is some business to which I must attend.” He managed to fit a cigarette between his lips. I took the slim gold lighter from his fingers and lit the end for him. I concentrated on the movements of my fingers, this ordinary activity, to keep the panic from rising in my chest.

      “But what about our guests?” I said.

      “I have left messages. They will understand, don’t you think?” He pulled the cigarette away and kissed my cheek. “Now run upstairs, ma chérie, and pack your things. Come, now. It is for the best. One should always leave the party before the bitter end, isn’t it so?”

      “Yes,” I said numbly, “of course,” and I turned and ran up the steps, two at a time, and burst without breath into my room, where I stayed only long enough to snatch the pair of slim black binoculars from my desk and bolt down the hall in the opposite direction, to the back stairs.

      It was now the third week of August, and the sea washed restlessly against the rocks and beaches below as I stumbled along the clifftops, sucking air into my stricken lungs. I inhaled the warm scent of the dying summer, the weeks that would not return. I thought, I don’t care, I don’t care if we leave now and return to Paris, I have my own plans, I will live in Montparnasse, I will be sophisticated and insouciant, and he can find me or not find me, he can love me or not love me, I don’t care, I don’t care.

      I skidded to a stop at the familiar rock, the rock where I had sat every day and watched the traffic in the giant mammary curves of the bay, in the delicate cleavage of which perched the village of Cannes. From here, you could see the boats zagging lazily, the ferries looping back and forth to the îsles Lérins, to Sainte-Marguerite, where the fort nestled into the cliffs. I climbed to the top of the boulder and lifted the binoculars to my eyes and thought, I don’t care, I don’t care, please God, please God, I don’t care.

      From this angle, to the east of the islands, it was impossible to see where the Isolde lay moored—if she still lay moored at all—behind the Pointe du Dragon. I had tried—no, I hadn’t tried, of course not, I had only dragged

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